Anarcho-Esperanto

For all those interested in the international language, Esperanto, SAT-Liberecana Frakcio, the anarchist section of SAT (the World Non-national Asociation) has recently modified its webpages, which can be seen HERE.

Okay, some background info...
Over the last hundred or so years, there's been a link between Esperanto and sections of the anarchist movement, most notably in early 20th century China and Japan, but also within the pre-WW2 Bulgarian movement and during the Spanish revolution, where CNT-FAI produced its own Esperanto Informa Bulteno which was distributed in Spain and internationally. Nowadays, the Liberecana Frakcio is the main point of contact for Esperanto speaking anarchists from many countries.

Why bother?
Some might ask, why bother learning Esperanto when English is already a kind of international language? Well, that's a perfectly valid question. At present, English is a lingua franca of business and capital. Previously, French was considered to be the international language, and in the not too distant future, English may well be superceded by Chinese.

The point is, to learn any 'national' language for the purpose of international communication is a fuck of a big job. It takes time, loads of study, a certain level of education and money. All too often, you can learn a language from books, CDs, the internet or go to classes, but when you get to a country where they speak the language you've spent ages learning, you still can't make head nor tail of it.

If you find languages hard, you'll always be in the shit. But if are a brilliant linguist, you'll still always be the 'foreigner' at a linguistic disadvantage, no matter how clever you are with languages.

Esperanto is comparatively so much easier than a national language and you can be up and running with it in a short time. In other words, you can learn in months, what it would take years to learn in any national or regional language. It needs far less time. You don't need to be highly educated or 'academeic' or particularly linguistic, and it's cheap or free to learn.

Prefigurative politics
Esperanto not only levels the linguistic playing field, in terms of internationalism, it makes total sense to use an auxilliary bridge language to work internationally. If any potential future society were dominated by English, Chinese or whatever the dominant and imperialist pre-revolutionary language of the time, then to merely adopt that language and all its inherent problems and social and economic implications would be incredibly sloppy and backward looking on our part. Think instead, of building any future global revolution internationalism within the shell of the old internationalism.

Okay, that's me sounding off... I'll go and get my tin hat and wait for the potential backlash

Courses
In the meantime, if you want to learn Esperanto, try either the Free Esperanto Course or Lernu.net